Finding his way home: winning a U.S. Open and a family's love 35 years ago at Oak Hill showed Lee Trevino what was missing in his life

Golf Digest, August, 2003 by Jaime Diaz

LEE TREVINO WEARS A catcher's mitt with easy familiarity, gracefully handling all the heat his 10-year-old son, Daniel, can muster. Trevino may be 63, with a backbone that has been sizzled by lightning and inlaid with titanium, and he's more than a half century removed from the last time he donned the tools of ignorance. But his balanced crouch and deft glove hand announce a gifted man the same way his elongated extension toward the target still does in golf.

It's a classic American scene, except for the irony. Playing catch is just another thing Trevino never did with his own father, whom he didn't know, or his grandfather, Joe Trevino, a laborer and gravedigger who never let him close. And then there's the fact that the elegantly verdant five-acre property in Dallas' Preston Hollow on which Trevino is tossing the baseball, and where he, his third wife, Claudia, and their children, Olivia, 14, and Daniel, live in a meticulously restored 15-room French country estate, sits less than three miles from where Trevino grew up in a four-room shack that lacked electricity and plumbing.

"Used to hunt rabbits through here," Trevino says as he crosses an arched limestone bridge that spans a peaceful brook. "Used to fish in this creek. The same house was here, built in 1939, the same year I was born."

It's old turf, but with his two youngest children, Trevino is definitely breaking new ground.

"From the way I was raised, it's a stone miracle where I am today," says Trevino, an eighth-grade dropout. "But God gave me a few things. Talent and determination, sure. But he also gave me the ability to adapt to whatever the hell I take up and practice at it and make it work. I've always told people that I'm an uneducated engineer. I will figure things out, somehow."

So even in a career that often moved in blur, Trevino took notice, filing away what he would incorporate into his life. And considering the stability of Trevino's current nuclear family, one of the most formative experiences of his career took place 35 years ago in Rochester, N.Y., the week Trevino won the 1968 U.S. Open at Oak Hill, the site of the PGA Championship Aug. 14-17.

In terms of golf, Trevino's victory ranks as one of the most magical moments in the history of the game. Then 28, Trevino seemed larger than life, an effervescent, Runyonesque character out of West Texas who in the final round matched his red "payday" shirt with red socks and stood up to a charge from Jack Nicklaus. In Trevino's first official victory, he tied the championship scoring record of 275 and became the first champion to break 70 in all four rounds.

But for Trevino's life away from competition, Oak Hill offered something just as profound. That week he stayed in the Pittsford, N.Y., home of Paul and Barbara Kircher and their five children, then ages 3 to 13. Paul Kircher ran a successful local insurance company, and all his children (two more would follow) went on to attain college degrees. During a tournament week Trevino had never stayed with another family--and hasn't since--but he submitted to an "Eight is Enough"/"Father Knows Best" environment in the Kirchers' three-bedroom, one-bath home after Paul Kircher, tipped by a friend that Trevino was a sleeper, had written a letter of invitation.

"Even then, I liked holing up in hotel rooms, but there was something about the letter that hit a soft spot," remembers Trevino. "The Kirchers are special people, a great family. I didn't really know what to expect, but I just had a good feeling. Maybe it all worked because their home was so opposite from the way I grew up."

His own upbringing is a subject Trevino has reflected on more and more as he has grown older. He has come to understand--after two failed marriages in which he admits he neglected his first four children in favor of golf--how past can be prologue, and how those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. He once used humor to deflect the grimness of his early years ("I was 21 before I knew 'Manual Labor' wasn't a Mexican"), but Trevino today addresses the subject more as solemn witness than entertainer.

"My grandfather was a knife fighter," he recalls, lying back on a couch amid warm rays in his home's sunroom. "He was small, but he was a scrapper, with a crooked nose, like a boxer. He was very short-fused. Very short-fused. He'd pull a knife out on you in a minute. He had scars all over his chest. I saw my grandfather and my uncle get into it once in our house. They were drunk. I don't remember what started it, but my grandfather was going to shoot my uncle--his son--with a shotgun. This is what I saw.

"I got beat on. I got hit with razor straps. I got hit with brooms. I got slapped in the mouth.

"I'm sure it had an effect. I've got a short fuse, too. I used to get into fistfights all the time. Someone would say something, and it would be, Here we go. I've learned to avoid those situations, but even today, if a guy puts his hands on me, that's it. Then it's either a left hook or a right cross. I don't care how big he is. And I might get whupped. I got whupped a lot of times. But I'm not scared. Not scared of much. I've got a lot of my grandfather in me, that old school."